I then asked them what their grandparents did and most said they were peasant farmers. So I
asked if any of them were happy with their farms and did these kids consider their
grandparents to be successful or not.

China's economic growth in developed provinces has been compressed into 30 years, two generations.

In the U.S. and most of the Western world, post-WWI or WWII is 70 - 95 years ago, our own economic evolution. Western high school kids have absolutely no conception of what an agrarian life would look like. Yet many of our Chinese students are today eating Spring Festival dinner with their grandparents, surrounded by chickens and pigs.

Chinese students now still personally experience China's economic transformation. Sadly, I suspect in another generation students will no longer be able to eat freshly killed chicken and homegrown vegetables on the farm while listening to their grandparents stories of China's past, of struggle and hunger. Soon they will be like our children and grandchildren in the West, untouched by the values of physical labor and respect for the working man, buried in their internet lives with no grounding in the way that the world's poor still lives.